From Memex to YouTube: An Introduction to New Media Studies, Spring 2009

9:30 am - 10:45 am TR Sid Rich 326
Dr. Gardner Campbell
Office: Academy for Teaching and Learning, Jones Library, Suite 206 / 710-3412 / gardner_campbell AT baylor.edu/
Office Hrs. TR 2-3 p.m. & by appt.
http://www.gardnercampbell.net

COURSE LEARNING OBJECTIVES (generated by the seminar students on Tuesday, January 20; compiled and entered into the wiki by Philip)

About This Class: What Is New Media Studies?

From Janet Murray's introduction to ''The New Media Reader'', "Inventing the Medium":

This is a landmark volume, marking the first comprehensive effort at establishing the genealogy of the computer as an expressive medium.

Although the name of the book is ''The New Media Reader'', its subject is the emergence of a single medium, and one which we can define more particularly than by merely pointing to its novelty. The ''digital medium'' which we see emerging in these well-selected and contextualized essays may seem plural to us now, because it is so myriad in its forms--virtual reality CAVEs, the Internet, "enhanced" television, videogames. Indeed, like the medium of film 1000 years earlier, the compute medium is drawing on many antecedents and spawning a variety of formats. But the term "new media" is a sign of our current confusion about where these efforts are leading and our breathlessness at the pace of change,particularly in the last two decades of the 20th century. How long will it take before we see the gift for what it is--a single new medium of representation, the digital medium, formed by the braided interplay of technical invention and cultural expression at the end of the 20th century? This reader, reflecting the burgeoning of "New Media Studies" throughout academic life and new media practice throughout the world, should help to hasten that change in our thinking.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janet_Murray Here is the Wikipedia entry on Dr. Murray. The discussion page (a feature of all Wikipedia articles) includes this note from Dr. Murray herself:

I have revised this page about myself to more accurately summarize my book and the response to it. On my first try I appended my changes but this time I got it right and replaced the previous entry with this partial rewrite. It is odd to come across an encyclopedia entry to oneself and hard to judge what is appropriate to say. I did want the key arguments of the book to be clearly stated, and I thought the original longer critique of the book was too vague to engage, especially in a biographical entry. I added a reference to second public discourse about the book (Sven Birkerts debate with me, on http://hotwired.com) in addition to the ludologists and I pointed to a key source for the ludologist use of the book in the first issue of Game Studies (http://www.gamestudies.org ) . I meant to be neutral and non-self-promoting and I hope I succeeded. THanks to Snowspinner for including me. I'm glad to see a section on digital media criticism. I think it will be quite useful. Janet Murray

http://www.lcc.gatech.edu/~murray/ Here is Dr. Murray's faculty page at Georgia Tech.

From Lev Manovich's introduction to ''The New Media Reader'', "New Media from Borges to HTML":

What is New Media? Eight Propositions

1. New Media versus Cyberculture: "cyberculture does not directly deal with new cultural objects enabled by network communication technologies. The study of these objects is the domain of new media."
2. New Media as a Computer Technology Used as a Distribution Platform: "new media are the cultural objects which use digital computer technology for distribution and exhibition."
3. New Media as Digital Data Controlled by Software: "all cultural objects that rely on digital representation and computer-based delivery do share a number of common qualities ...: numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability, and transcoding. I do not assume that any computer-based cultural object will necessarily be structured according to these principles today. Rather, these are tendencies of a culture undergoing computerization that gradually will manifest themselves more and more."
4. New Media as the Mix Between Existing Cultural Conventions and the Conventions of Software: "new media today can be understood as the mix between older cultural conventions for data representation, access, and manipulation of data and newer conventions of data representation, access, and manipulation. The 'old' data are representations of visual reality and human experience ... what we normally understand by 'culture.' The 'new' data is numerical data."
5. New Media as the Aesthetics that Accompanies the Early Stage of Every New Modern Media and Communication Technology: "aesthetic strategies for representing the real," as influenced by new digital technologies (e.g., Digital Video filmmaking that's no longer limited to twenty-minutes-at-a-time film canisters).
6. New Media as Faster Execution of Algorithms Previously Executed Manually or through Other Technologies: "a new way [of thinking] about both digital computing, in general, and new media in particular ... a massive speed-up of various manual techniques that all have already existed.... The basic point of dialectics is that a substantial change in quantity (i.e., in speed of execution in this case) leads to the emergence of qualitatively new phenomena."
7. New Media as the Encoding of Modernist Avant-Garde; New Media as Metamedia: "The old media avant-garde of the 1920s came up with new forms, new ways to represent reality and new ways to see the world. The new media avant-garde is about new ways of accessing and manipulating information. Its techniques are hypermedia, databases, search engines, data mining, image processing, visualization, and simulation.... What I would like to str5ess (and what I think the original theorists of post-modernism in the 1980s have not stressed enough) is the key role played by the material factors in the shift towards postmodernist aesthetics: the accumulation of huge media assets and the arrival of new electronic and digital tools which made it very easy to access and re-work these assets."
8. New Media as Parallel Articulation of Similar Ideas in Post WWII Art and Modern Computing: "it would be logical if parallels between the Baroque and new media can also be established. It can also be argued that in many ways new media returns us to a pre-modernist cultural logic of the eighteenth century: consider, for instance, the parallel between eighteenth-century communities of readers who were also all writers and participants in Internet newsgroups and mailing lists who are also both readers and writers."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev_Manovich Here is the Wikipedia entry on Dr. Manovich.
http://www.manovich.net/ Here is Dr. Manovich's website.

Two Goals: Knowing and Making

From the editors' preface:

Understanding new media is almost impossible for those who aren't actively involved in the experience of new media; for deep understanding, actually creating new media projects is essential to grasping their workings and poetics. The ideas described in these selections can open important new creative areas for beginners and professionals alike.

A Sampling of New Media Studies programs

DePaul University (http://www.history.org/visit/eventsAndExhibits/specialEvents/storytelling05.cfm ): "New Media Studies is an emerging, interdisciplinary field that can perhaps be best understood in two ways: first, it is the study of the process through which media (photographs, text, audio, television) are rendered into numerical or digital forms that marks these objects as new. Second, the newness of new media comes from the study of the products that result from rendering these media numerically and then combining them into new media forms such as web sites, webcasts, interactive games, graphic designs, CD-ROMs of sales and technical information, and so on."

University of Minnesota Minor in New Media Studies (http://www.inms.umn.edu/newmediaminor/about.htm)

NYU Tisch School program in Interactive Telecommunications (http://itp.tisch.nyu.edu/page/home.html)

University of Denver program in Digital Media Studies (http://dms.du.edu/main/about.cfm): "Digital Media Studies at the University of Denver fosters the work of innovative students interested in using digital methods and forms to creatively explore, and critically comment on, the digital conditions rapidly altering every aspect of our reality. DMS provides cross-disciplinary support for the study and practice of digital media with courses in art and design; 3D; animation; video and audio; interactive media; games; HCI design; Web and network development; flash remoting; and seminars and lectures exploring the critical, philosophical, legal, political, and cultural dimensions of digital media."

SYLLABUS (beta)

Primary print text: ''The New Media Reader'' (MIT Press, 2003).
Other Class Resources

NB: If you have a laptop, please bring it to each class meeting. If you do not have a laptop, see me and I will make other arrangements for you.

1/13 Introduction: MOAD, Wesch, Robbie Dingo. Web 2.0 orientation. Blogs at http://courseblogs.gardnercampbell.net. Social bookmarking at http://www.delicious.com, Optional (?): Diigo.com, Netvibes.com.

1/15 READ: Preface; Two Introductions (3-28)

1/20 CLASS PROJECT DAY: Learning Objectives (READ: Bush, "As We May Think")

1/22 CLASS PROJECT DAY: Wikipedia entry on New Media Studies (READ: Borges, "The Garden of Forking Paths") NOTE--change in reading assignment

1/27 READ: Licklider, "Man-Computer Symbiosis" NOTE--change in reading assignment

1/29 READ: Engelbart, from "Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework"

2/3 VIEW (ahead of class): Engelbart et al., "1968 Demo" (CD-ROM in text). Continue discussion of Engelbart essay. (Teleclass this day)

2/5 READ: Engelbart/English, "A Research Center for Augmenting Human Intellect"

FIRST CONFERENCE--SIGN UP HERE

2/10 READ: Nelson, from "Computer Lib / Dream Machines"

2/12 Continue discussion of Nelson

2/17 READ: Kay/Goldberg, "Personal Dynamic Media"

2/19 PROJECT DISCUSSION DAY

2/24 READ: McLuhan, selections from "The Gutenberg Galaxy" and "The Medium is the Message"

2/26 Continue discussion of McLuhan

2/27 SPECIAL EVENT: NMC 101: Introduction to the New Media Consortium Location, Time TBA

3/3 READ: Papert, "Mindstorms"

3/5 PROJECT DISCUSSION DAY: Please review class learning objectives and be prepared to discuss our progress and offer ideas for moving forward.

SPRING BREAK

3/17 READ: McCloud, "Time Frames" NB: Class doesn't meet today--work on projects

3/19 Discuss McCloud

3/24 READ: Viola, "Will There Be Condominiums in Data Space?"

3/26 READ: http://www.preservenet.com/theory/Illich/Deschooling/intro.html selections from Illich, ''Deschooling Society'' (online)

Read as much as you want, but be sure to read at least http://www.preservenet.com/theory/Illich/Deschooling/chap6.html chapter 6 ("Learning Webs").

3/31 Project discussion 1

4/2 Project discussion 2

4/7 READ:Morningstar and Farmer, "The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat"

4/9 READ: Simak, "Immigrant" (to discuss in class)

4/14 Discuss "Immigrant" (continued)

4/16 READ: Turkel, "Video Games and Computer Holding Power"

Final Projects NMS S09

4/21 READ: Berners-Lee et al., "The World Wide Web"

4/23 Discuss Berners-Lee

4/27-4/31 SCHOLARS' WEEK, FINAL PRESENTATIONS 4/28, 4/30

5/8 FINAL EXAM (9-11 a.m.)

Assignments

* One substantive blog post per class meeting, faithfully.
* One substantive comment on a classmate's blog per class meeting, faithfully.
* Frequent, substantive contributions to class wiki.
* Robust participation in del.icio.us.
* Robust participation in class discussions, informed by faithful, careful work with assigned readings.
* Final project (accompanied by a written component, including a self-evaluation).
* Final project presentation.
* Final exam.

Weighting:
Blogs, comments, robust participation in class and online activities as above: 40%
Final project, including written component and presentation: 40%
Final exam: 20%

CLASS TAG

baylor_nms_s09